Sabato, 15 febbraio 2003

About this war

Dave wrote this piece about the current situation. I must say that I strongly disagree, mostly because it gets to a sort of personal level that so many times has been criticized on scripting.com pages.

I don't think that France, Germany and millions of people around the world, including in the US, are against the United States or its people. They are against this war.

Sure, there are many reasons to remove Saddam Hussein from its position, I think that nobody argues about this and nobody is trying to defend him for what he has done to his people. He was put there, armed and financed by the US, but that happened long ago, during another war: the Cold War.

Just like Saddam, there are many other dictators around the world, doing even worse than what Saddam Hussein is doing, and still, nobody is sending troops to remove them.

The US Government appears to be willing to start this war even without the support of the UN, meaning against the will of many other countries. Doesn't seem very democratic to me.

There's September 11. But nobody has so far demonstrated in any satisfactory way a link between the Saddam's regime and the terrorists, also if apparently there are links between the strong presence of Western forces on Arab soil since the first Gulf War and the development of terrorist groups such as Al Quaeda. But anyway, before bombing a country and killing lots of innocent people I would like to have something stronger than a few hints here and there.

Yes, because this is what we are talking about, a war. It's not only about removing Saddam Hussein, it's about bombing a country and, like it or not, killing hundreds or thousands of innocent people who had the bad luck of being in that part of the world. Think about it.

Saddam Hussein has to step down and possibly to respond for what he has done, no doubt about it. Is it making a war the only way to achieve this result? I'm not as sure as many Americans seems to be. Maybe because since I'm European I'm naturally scared by brutal and hypocritical wars.

Since the end of WW2, after most of Europe has been liberated by the last brutal regimes by the Americans and the other allied forces (no, nobody forgets here, we have hundreds of thousands of dead bodies buried under large and small bright monuments almost everywhere), European countries did something that never happened before: we build a union without wars, peacefully. A union that now shares not only a currency but most of all many values, laws and freedom.

Let's think seriously about all this, it's not about France and Germany vs. the US, it's about a war. I don't see any evident reason to rush this whole thing and not trying harder to find a different solution. Think.